Quote:Hello. First I have to say thank you for wikipedia, it's become my central hub for research and that means volumes to me.

My question concerns the creation of an article about this website: http://www.tcforums.com

Basically, we have around 7 to 8 years of history, mostly comedic but most of it quite personal and even introspective. We are a message board that broke off from a more corporate site and started up on our own. We are now down to about 10 active members and we fear that after all these years, Tendo City may be falling off the map. What we aim to do is create the article (essentially about Nintendo, the company and us being its fans) to preserve Tendo City and help new members catch up on our history as we progress to hopefully gaining said new members.

I dont want it to seem like an ad, obviously you wouldn't want that either. As we are not a corporate site and do not have any income from the site I think you can see that we have good intentions to fill the article with good content about the obscure message board and its cast.

The reason I have sent this email is because one of the members tried to create the article and was subsequently deleted without notification or reason, so we dont know what rules we broke or how to circumvent them. We would very much appreciate the ability to display this article and keep in step with the guidelines of wikipedia.

As with other areas of your site, I would like to see Wikipedia become not just a neo-Babylonian library, but also a central hub for internet musings and oddities. History of cyberspace and what not. We feel that we could be a major part of that history as we are among one of the first major forums of the internet for Nintendo but also that there are many, many forums out there with a tight knit group of people who feel like they own their own little corner of the internet and eventually fall in to obscurity as well. The funny, the weird, the informative and the plain bizzare should be incorporated and Tendo City (with such topics as religion, politics, game design, etc) fits all of these catagories.

If it would be possible to create this article within the guidelines of wiki without it being deleted by administration please let me know. If it is not possible, if you could please, tell us why. Perhaps a happy medium could be met. I'm sure I dont need to explain the centralized mentality of the internet, how it's a 'seperate world' and contains its own vast history, but I would like you to see that Tendo City is a part of that history and, at the very least, will make anyone who had been a part of it be able to catch up on the forum and add their experiences with it.

Thank you for your response,
Sean

Quote:This page gives some rough guidelines which Wikipedia editors use to decide if any form of web specific-content, being either the content of a website or the specific website itself should have an article on Wikipedia. Web content includes, but is not limited to, web comics, podcasts, blogs, message boards, online magazines and other media, web portals and web hosts. Any content which is distributed solely on the internet is considered, for the purposes of this guideline, as web content.[1]

Many Wikipedians are wholly averse to the use of Wikipedia for advertising, and Wikipedia articles are not advertisements is an official policy of long standing. Advertising is either cleaned up to adhere to the neutral point of view or deleted.[2]

There is also consensus amongst many Wikipedia editors that Wikipedia is not a web directory, in that it is not a site that specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. Explicitly and by formal policy, Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files. Articles which merely include an external link and a brief description of its contents will also be either cleaned up to adhere to the neutral point of view or deleted.

In the case of such articles being listed for deletion, such a listing occurs at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, and Wikipedia editors apply the criteria outlined here.

Contents [hide]
1 Criteria for web content
2 Comparisons
3 See also
4 Notes



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Criteria for web content
Web specific-content[3] is notable if it meets any one of the following criteria:

The content itself has been the subject of multiple non-trivial published works whose source is independent of the site itself.
This criterion excludes:
Media re-prints of press releases and advertising for the content or site.[4]
Trivial coverage, such as newspaper articles that simply report the internet address, the times at which such content is updated or made available, a brief summary of the nature of the content or the publication of internet addresses and site or content descriptions in internet directories or online stores.
This criterion includes reliable published works in all forms, such as newspaper and magazine articles, books, television documentaries, and published reports by consumer watchdog organizations.[5]
The website or content has won a well known and independent award, either from a publication or organisation.[6]
The content is distributed via a site which is both well known and independent of the creators, either through an online newspaper or magazine, an online publisher, or an online broadcaster. [7]
The article itself must provide proofs that its subject meets one of these criteria via inlined links or a "Reference" or "External link" section.

[edit]
Comparisons
In discussions on web-related topics, people frequently refer to the amount of members or search engine hits a site gets. While it is never good to base a decision solely (or even mainly) upon such statistics, the figures below can give a quick indication of orders of magnitude.

Quote:I think our best bet is to pursue some other avenue. GR's ava-comics give me an idea of a sort. Now, those comics in and of themselves won't attract people, but a comic about the life of "a typical web forum" may actually be untapped ground. I for one have yet to see one like that. I submit we actually create a buzz for our sight by making our main attraction a frickin' web comic. Yes, there are many, but if we try and make a comic more people than ourselves can relate to, that actually is mostly intended to poke fun at the typical behavior one finds in a forum, that could be entertainment gold. And yes, we will also include a lot of in-jokes about the stuff that goes on in our own forum.